Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and a system for facilitating the establishment of a virtual private network (VPN) in a cellular communication network, in particular to a method and a system for facilitating the establishment of a virtual private network in a cellular communication network connecting client devices irrespective of the Mobile Network Operators (MNO) the client devices are associated with.
Description of Related Art
Affairs of individuals and enterprises are increasingly being conducted in an automated manner over the Internet. For example, enterprises engage in selling their products and services over the Internet, individuals engage in communicating with one another over the Internet and employees may also access secure resources of their employers over the Internet.
When employees access secure assets of an enterprise over the Internet, the enterprise has to ensure that the access is secure. One mechanism to achieve this is the establishment of a VPN connection.
A VPN extends a private network across a public network, such as the Internet. It enables a computer to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if it is directly connected to the private network, while benefiting from the functionality, security and management policies of the private network. A VPN is created by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated connections, virtual tunneling protocols, or traffic encryptions.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,516,569 B2 discloses techniques for uninterrupted VPN connection service with dynamic policy enforcement. Here, a request is received in order to change an Internet Protocol (IP) address for an existing VPN session between a VPN client and a VPN server. The new IP address is to replace an existing IP address being used in the existing VPN session. Next, a VPN connection table entry is updated for the VPN session with the new IP address. Finally, a new credential is supplied to the VPN client for automatically re-authenticating during the existing VPN session to the new IP address without the VPN client losing service to the existing VPN session.
Today, VPN is either based on customer equipment or on cellular communication networks. Using customer equipment for the establishment of a VPN connection might result in low latency, however the deployment of the customer equipment is not always possible. On the other hand, facilitating the establishment of a virtual private network in a cellular communication network of a specific MNO requires that all members of the VPN belong to the same MNO. However, there might be situations when machine to machine (M2M) interaction might need low latency communication while subjects are belonging to different MNOs.
Therefore, methods for facilitating the establishment of a virtual private network with low latency are desirable.